


Signals: Turn, Hazard, from Space and Otherwise

by Amand_r



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Multi, auction fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-07
Updated: 2011-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-17 17:36:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/179399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack finds that he wishes they were suddenly elsewhere, that he hadn't crashed the car, that he could predict them better, that he had understood just what Ianto had meant when he'd said <em>take her out</em>, or that at least they could all have name tags, so his could say, <em>'Hello! My name is CONFUSED/HORNY/SENTIMENTAL/IMMORTAL/LOVEMENOW'</em>.  Though maybe it would just read, <em>'Jack.  Just Jack'</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Signals: Turn, Hazard, from Space and Otherwise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opium_and_tea](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=opium_and_tea).



> **Author's Notes:** this is for opium_and_tea who purchased my services in the lightning round at help_haiti last week (?), and I apologise at the lateness. Thank you 51stcenturyfox for the beta.

_I am a free companion—I bivouac by invading watchfires._  
\--Walt Whitman, 'Song of Myself'

Jack and Ianto take Tosh ice skating because Owen says that she's looking a little nerdy. Jack would smack him in the back of the head, but he's across the Hub, and besides, Ianto is there to do it anyway. Well, he doesn't actually _hit_ Owen so much as he spills coffee on a quite nice Playboy that he'd got from a crime scene (confiscated with a hand wave and cry of, "Torchwood!", like that's the new catchphrase for eminent domain or something.). Any idiot can see that Toshiko is wearing her cleavage sweater today, and it's about a week before Valentine's Day, so there's only one reason she'd do that.

Jack doesn't think that nerds have to necessarily be _un-hot_ , but Tosh takes it as the insult that Owen intends it to be, pinching her sweater shut to cover up the generous mounds of healthy breasts and Jack feels disappointed, because covertly sneaking looks at Toshiko's assets was going to be the highlight of his day. Instead it has to be this Milka bar and a wank in the loo. Bah.

Then Ianto sits in his office and says, "I think Tosh is lonely."

Jack internally rolls his eyes because it couldn't be more obvious if Tosh had come in with a nametag that said, _'Hello! My name is LONELY'_.

But Ianto makes some suggestions about them taking her out (his voice is filled with something and then he says _take her out_ and Jack snorts coffee because he replaces "take" with something else and while yeah, that would be hot, Ianto doesn't seem like that kind of guy), and Jack agrees, waving his hand and thinking about wanking in the loo and the Milka bar and also this mild report of alien saucers over Penarth, because someone should be worrying about that. What he ends up settling on is that the wank is boring, utilitarian, the Milka bar is okay but plain, and the alien saucers are bad weather balloons, so really, he's left with the fact that Ianto has suggested oral sex with a co-worker who is not Jack, thoroughly proving that Jack can still be surprised.

Of course, there are times when Jack doesn't know anything about the people around him, even the ones he has occasion to stick his cock into.

Toshiko can ice skate. He doesn't know why he's surprised, really, or even surprised that Ianto can ice skate. Or that he can ice skate. He's pretty good at it (for a three month stint it had been the only thing Alice had wanted to do on their unsupervised outings together), and so there's none of that awkwardness in which two people are quite capable and the third person just holds on to the sidelines for dear life.

They go around and around the rink in silence. There are only three or four other people there, and they're all Michelle Kwan wanna-bes, with their salchows and triple axels. Jack sometimes thinks the rink hires these individuals, like professional dancers seeding a night club.

And then Jack had gone for hot chocolate from the street vendor and when he'd returns, Ianto is trying to do some sort of lift with Tosh, and he has to wonder if they've been holding out on him. But he stands there, setting the three paper cups on the railing and watches Ianto lift Tosh by the waist and then transfer one of his hands to her inner thigh and make a curve on the ice while her hands do something like mittened lily stalks and his mind goes to what he likes to call 'the good place'.

'The good place' is a world filled with sweat and licking, really, and just the general sensation of coming for all eternity. Well, and the things that lead to the coming. He likes the stretch of Toshiko's legs, and how Ianto's hand moves across her crotch when he lowers her, and they complete their lazy circle, decelerating, and she's skating backwards in his arms and his forehead is pressed to hers and their smiles are for each other, for ever. He blinks like a shutter closing and if his head could make the click noise of a camera, it would. Time even feels like it pauses, like that film technique through the camera lens when someone is taking pictures, where the image freezes to denote that it's been photographed.

Ianto skates Tosh right into the wall there and she's laughing and he presses into her on impact, arms on the wall on either side of her, trapping her there, but of course she doesn't see it that way. No one who looks at them thinks that except for Jack, whose brain is still stuck with one foot in reality and the other in 'the good place,' and lord that's a good place to be when one is contemplating the mechanics of wrangling a co-worker into bed (platonically) with your (significant) other who also just happens to be a co-worker with both of you (platonically, sort of maybe).

Just the dynamic of it alone is too much for him to wrap his brain around; it comes with strings and variables and if he could map it in 3-D he'd need someone like a blood spatter expert to diagram it, with little bits of yarn stuck to the wall by words like, 'jealousy' and 'disharmony' and 'awkward' and 'daisy chain'. And a few more, like 'wheelbarrow', 'refractory period', and just for good measure, 'finger-fucking'.

"You two haven't told me everything," he says raising an eyebrow.

Ianto brushes his lips on the top of Tosh's bent head, and she escapes from his grasp long enough to look at Jack with her wide happy eyes and say, 'Oh! Hot chocolate!" before Ianto sets her free and she peels back her mittens to show the hands underneath, like opening the bud of a flower at night to see the folded petals.

Her hair is a whiskbroom of a ponytail, though it's fruitless, as her fringe falls into her face and over her eyes, Jack supposes she does it to give herself the illusion of control over her hair. He's never had anything other than short hair, even back at the turn of the century when he could have grown it out more, he tried to keep it trim, as if he were afraid that the Doctor wouldn't recognise him with longer hair. Before that, well, the Time Agency thought short hair ideal for disguises, and before that it had been the military, and no matter what century, they still think shorter hair tends to be less of a liability.

He thinks of Gwen's dark fall of hair, of Owen's short sculpted hair full of product that always smells like something he wants to bury his face in, of Ianto's trimmed hair a few feet away, almost right under his nose. It's usually slightly stiff with something, but not like Owen's, something he can run his fingers through without ruining it.

Jack leans on the wall/partition of the rink and sips his chocolate. It's made from a powder, he can tell, and it's too sweet. Ianto and Tosh don't seem to care, they grew up on this powdered mix, and if Jack were to ask them how to make hot chocolate, Tosh would say, 'Buy the mix and add hot water.' Ianto would probably just say, 'Why? Do you want some? I could get some for you at Tesco's.' Then when Jack would say, 'No, just wondering,' Ianto would get some, think better of it, and then melt some shaved chocolate and make it for real, an Jack would find it waiting for him, spiced and dark on his desk in the middle of a dull, dreary afternoon.

Because Ianto thinks of everything, and when he thinks of it, he rethinks it to make sure that he's thought it properly. Like right now, Ianto is setting his cup down so that he can pick up Tosh at the waist and set her on the partition, and then he cuts a glance to Jack that's so sharp and fast it's wafer thin, like a tissue cut of prosciutto or one of those knives on late night TV that can cut through a tin can. Tosh's bladed feet kick, but she never manages to do damage with them, except for the inadvertent gouging by the backs on the wood of the wall when she thuds their heavy weight against it.

Ianto settles himself into the curve of her thighs, partly to hold her steady on the wall, and partly because he wants to do Tosh here, Jack can tell he's already turned it over in his mind for a full cycle, and now the tumbler is just running every few minutes or so, like a dryer that turns the clothes in it every three minutes to keep them from wrinkling. Jack knows he's supposed to fetch the laundry here, but he wants to wait, he wants to watch it draw out, like raising the wine bottle above the glass higher and higher to watch the stream thin out. To see how far you can take it before there's a spill.

The trick is to know where that point is, or to not mind when you do spill. Ianto doesn't like spills, but he will for this one, of Jack does it right.

Because Toshiko is lonely, just like Ianto has told him, but what Ianto hadn't said, but which is also just as true, is that Ianto is lonely, too. Jack is, Ianto has told him, multiple times and in many conditions, the best sex Ianto has ever had, but they have never—

Well it's not for lack of trying. Jack is sure that if he tried harder, they could have some sort of, well, maybe. Jack has been trying, and they're getting there, and it's not that Jack is a man, or that he's older it's that Ianto and he are puzzle pieces that don't fit, or rather, no, they're puzzle pieces that fit together comfortably, but they're from different puzzles. Jack is coloured with a photograph of stars in space and maybe a tiny sliver of a blue-surfaced planet, and Ianto is a cut of a rolling green hill, perhaps a cut-off leg or head of a sheep. Maybe something poetic like that.

Even Toshiko's coat is green, Tosh with her bright eyes and clever mind and curving lips and her dark hair sprinkled with droplets of melted ice like stars.

Jack bins their cups when they're all finished, and he lets Tosh coax him out for a few more turns. Then he harangues Ianto into a half-hearted attempt at a lift, and they end up on the ice, skittering across it in a jumble of arms and legs, and Ianto says something like, 'I think I've fractured my spleen,' and Tosh just laughs at them, because, as she had told them earlier, 'If you fall, first I'm going to laugh at you. Then I might ask you if you're all right.'

Jack should have seen it coming.

They trade in their skates when the rink starts to get busier with dates--couples holding hands in the rink, falling on each other and the partition; Jack checks his watch to discover that it's close to nine, and they have been there for well over an hour. There is mumbling about dinner perhaps, or maybe they should just go back to Tosh's, because she has leftovers there, and Ianto's flat, Jack has seen, is an unlived-in mess of clutter, the kind that accumulates when one only stops there long enough to sleep five hours and change clothes.

No one wants to go back to the Hub.

He hasn't seen Toshiko's flat in ages, but he remembers it being nice, organic, womblike in that Japanese way that resembles something Shinto but with British sensibilities. Useful widgets designed to flow with the flat's design, steel bent to look like trees in the rain, that kind of shit.

Tosh climbs in the back of the SUV and Ianto goes with her, because Jack knows he feels that someone should ride in the back with Tosh so that she doesn't feel excluded. The dynamic, Jack agrees, is ruined when two people sit in the front and the third sits in the back. Jack takes the leisurely route that even in the middle of a slight bit of bad weather is still only about a fifteen minute drive once he factors in the lights and the person in front of him who has decided to use their hazard blinkers. Tosh and Ianto trade a few halting stories of ice skating as children while Jack listens with half an ear. Something about the wipers moving on the windshield, the way the flakes of snow hit the glass and then melt on impact, is a little soothing, hypnotizing.

He isn't paying attention to the two of them (the roads are a bit slick with frozen sleet, that's Cardiff for you), and so when he hears the _sounds_ coming from the backseat and sees Ianto with his hands on Tosh's face and his tongue down her throat the natural response is to hit the pole.

It takes him a minute to realise that he's hit the pole, but Tosh is groaning, and there's a giant bag in front of his face and Ianto's voice is panicked when Jack realises that he's talking to him. "Jack? Are you all right? Jack? Tosh, are you, did you hit—"

"I'm fine," Tosh says. "Just a little bump. Is Jack…."

Jack pushes his face further into the airbag and wills himself to suffocate. He can hear the creaking of Ianto's leather jacket as he leans in between the front seats to check on him, fingers looking for his neck, for his shoulder, and then his face. "Jack, Jack are you—"

Jack sits back suddenly and inhales, like he does when coming back to life, and when Ianto jumps a little, he smiles at him. "Just joking."

Ianto's face is still painted with concern, but he mutters, "You're a shite." And then, now that everyone is fine, he says, "What happened?"

Jack thinks about what he could say. _I saw you two making out and lost control,_ doesn't sound like something charitable to say, and also he comes out of it looking pretty moronic. Gwen says that he lets his JT do too much thinking for him, and he doesn't want to have to explain the buckled bonnet and pole-shaped dent in the grill to her in reference to his dick.

So he blinks and says, "Black ice." That doesn't sound good enough. "There was a dog."

Ianto sits back and takes Tosh's head in his hands, cradling her chin. "Where did you hit it?"

"Well, I don't think I hit it, I think I managed to swerve in time—"

"No, _Tosh--_ where did you hit your head?"

Jack stares in the rear view mirror when Ianto touches two fingers to Tosh's temple. She bats his hand away. "No really, I'm fine. I had my belt on, and I think we were kept from the worst of it because we…." She trails off and stares at Jack, who must look odd to her because she can't tell he's looking at Ianto in the mirror. Angles. "Was there really a dog?"

Jack turns and then looks at Ianto, then at Tosh, their faces open and suspicious at the same time. They're so easy to read some days, and maybe the proximity of innocence, skating around a rink of ice like children, has loosened their cynicism in the manner of tapping a jar of pickles with a knife. He thinks about lying to them. _It was a huge dog. No no, tiny, little scamp, missing part of an ear. We should find him and adopt him, make him our Hub mascot._

"No," he says.

 _We'd name him Tramp._

Ianto fishes a handkerchief out of his pocket and hands it to him, and Jack realises that his face is dusty with the powder they pack the airbag in, so he accepts it with a shrug.

"Well," Toshiko says, sitting forward and peering out the front window. "Even if the front weren't…bendy, the car won't start now that the airbag has been deployed." She looks at him. "It's a practical safety feature, so I left it in."

Ianto sighs, an exhale that takes his posture with it, and he opens the door, pulling out his phone. "I'll have to call a service," he says. "Have it towed to the secure off-site location. We can strip it tomorrow and call the UNIT repair garage." He's walking away from them, as Tosh scrambles out his side and Jack tries his door, finding it unfettered. It's chilly and wet and he wonders why they even bothered to get out, when it's miserable weather, and warmer in the SUV, though not for long. Now that the engine's dead, for all intents and purposes, the heat will wear out in the cabin and they can run it. He wishes he had gloves, and then he remembers that he does. In the glove box. Ianto had bought them for him, with the same efficiency he's displaying now as he speaks into the phone and glances up at the street signs so that he can give the exact location.

Toshiko is pulling her own mobile and punches in a few letters, numbers, hieroglyphs. "I'll call us a taxi," she says, "Though we should wait until the truck gets here and tows…actually, I think we'll have to go with it." Her brows knit and she frowns minutely. "There's a lot of machinery in there that we wouldn't want someone to look at too closely…"

Ianto is snaps his mobile shut and walks back towards them, his hands shoved in his jeans pockets, collar flipped up. The coat, Jack hadn't been paying attention before, is leather, waist length, one of those shiny smooth black bomber jacket deals that looks suave and made for a twenty-five year old. Jack glances down at his own coat, more practical, made for a different kind of man.

"They're on their way, but there's a backlog." He shrugs. "The roads are nasty. Lot of accidents."

Tosh has her mobile pressed to her ear, her pulled-down hair covering her hand, veil-like. Ianto waves off a few people who have stopped and are walking towards them, asking things like, "Are you all right? Is anyone hurt?" Jack watches his posture change, as if he's wearing the suit, and it occurs to him that what the layers do to Ianto, who he becomes in the waistcoat and tie, he's that even when he's not in it, and Jack had something to do with that. A comfort. Sexy, but also something sad. Or maybe not.

He never asks Ianto if he's happy with what he is. He asks him if he's happy with what he has, with what he's experiencing, but never who he is.

Tosh lowers the mobile from her ear, "I'm going to have them come, because they say it's going to be a while, is that all right? We can follow the truck in the taxi and then take it home. I'll hide the billing in the financials."

Jack smiles. For a split second he'd forgot that there were practicalities in all of this. There's more than his internal monologue, like a wrecked car and a possible case of whiplash that won't show its head until tomorrow morning. He leans against the driver's door and wiggles his fingers in his gloves. Ianto waves off the last of the gawkers and returns, nodding to Tosh. "Tell them to take their time," he says, and she finishes the call, walking a ways away. Jack always wonders why people walk away to make calls. The sound isn't better over there, and he and Ianto can be quiet while she's talking.

"So, there was no dog," Ianto says, scuffing a chunk of slush with his toe and it crumbles under the weight. Jack listens to Tosh's murmur and the ticking of the cooling engine.

"No," he says, "No dog."

"Ah. This begs the question—"

"Ianto—"

"Since you have literally a hundred years of experience operating motor vehicles in all types of inclement weather—"

"You were kissing her."

Ianto turns his head then, finally, and they play the 'Let's look at each other in surprise even though we're neither one surprised' game. Ianto's brows are both up, and the lack of a smile is telling of something. "Yes," he says, "I was."

Jack thinks for a second. "This is about being lonely, isn't it?"

Ianto pulls one of his hands from his pockets, slides towards Jack so that their sides are flush, and then slips his hand into Jack's coat pocket, down over the front of his trousers to massage his soft cock through the fabric. "Not so much with lonely, Jack," he says, as if he's not starting a handjob in broad daylight. Ianto is a mixture of suit-work Ianto and leather jacket-off duty Ianto, and Jack wonders which one of him is up to making out with Tosh and giving Jack handjobs in plain sight of—

"They said they'd be here eventually," Tosh murmurs, approaching from Jack's other side and coming to stand in front of him but facing out. She shivers, and Jack knows that her coat is down and she can't possibly be cold. Oh who knows? Maybe she is.

Jack is about to suggest that she get back in the car while it's still warm when she leans back, plasters the back of herself against his front, and pushes the length of herself against him. Ianto doesn't pause his rubbing, but makes some sort of contented humming sound.

It's pleasant, when Toshiko rolls her head back and turns it to look at Ianto a bit, and Ianto's hand works Jack's cock, hard and thrumming and in general amused by this whole turn of events. Tosh presses her back against Ianto's hand, and that in turn rewards Jack with more pressure on his cock, and he has to close his eyes and smile.

"Thick as thieves," he says. He means to say more, but he's wondering why there aren't more people staring at them (all the curious have gone, and there's no blood or ambulances, so of course it's not that interesting, and they're not blocking traffic, not that there is any.). He leans his head against the SUV and opens his eyes to see the clear swatch of sky and stars, cut off and abbreviated by the skyline, like a puzzle piece right up there in full view.

Meanwhile, Ianto turns a little so that he can bring his free hand up to Tosh, and she takes it in both of hers, chafing the skin and blowing on it. "Ianto, where are your gloves?"

Ianto smiles. "Oops."

Tosh makes a noise, and Jack looks down at her, the back of her head dusted with snow, her perfume something floral and mysterious, stronger than earlier, probably because there's residual scent embedded in her coat; Tosh is the kind of girl who would put her perfume on after her coat, because she probably doesn't remember half the time until she's almost out the door. Ianto always smells like something, and he's never been able to put his finger on it. He thinks it's because it's not cologne, but after shave, and he suspects that Ianto simply buys whatever strikes his fancy at the moment he needs it. Maybe it's just taken him three years to find one he likes. Maybe he still hasn't.

"You're going to get frostbite," Tosh says, and on the last syllable she straightens and rolls her hips a little, taking Jack's breath with her. "I bet Jack has gloves." Her left hand reaches back to Jack's and pulls it forward, placing it on Ianto's cold one on her chest, pressing Ianto's hand into her open coat. She folds her arms so that no one can see Jack's hand kneading Ianto's as it massages Tosh's breast, not even when he pinches her nipple through the fabric of her sweater and bra.

Jack finds that he wishes they were suddenly elsewhere, that he hadn't crashed the car, that he could predict them better, that he had understood just what Ianto had meant when he'd said _take her out_ , or that at least they could all have name tags, so his could say, _'Hello! My name is CONFUSED/HORNY/SENTIMENTAL/IMMORTAL/LOVEMENOW'_. Though maybe it would just read, _'Jack. Just Jack'_.

In public it says, _'Hi. Captain Jack Harkness. Who are you?'_ Psychic nametags, wouldn't that be bloody useful. Then he could interpret Ianto's breath fogging the side of his neck from inches away, Tosh's full breast under Ianto's hand, his cock all but singing to be inside something, though the sleeve of Ianto's hand through coat, trousers and shorts is distant and comforting. He thrusts his hips, and it feels like a betrayal, like he's finally clueing Toshiko in to what's going on right under her arse, though she knows. That her back is to him is a barrier in itself, even when he moans a little, the kind of deep-throated thing that anyone passing by would be able to interpret clear as day.

Ianto presses his cheek to Jack's shoulder, his eyes glued to Tosh's face. "Shame about the car," he says, as if he's remarking on the weather and not at all feeling the both of them up. Tosh grinds back onto his knuckles and Jack thrusts again.

"You know, we could be here quite a while." Tosh's shoulders press into Jack's chest as she arches her spine, and Jack cups Ianto's hand tighter, moving his fingers over Ianto's to guide him as they roll and pull at her nipple.

Jack kisses the top of her head, gently, a peck, as if to show any invisible passers-by, 'Oh yes, it's all innocent here, we're just cold, I love her like a sister!' Even though he does and doesn't at the same time, and Ianto does and doesn't either, he knows for a fact.

It's a blessed shame that the taxi pulls up and the driver rolls down the window. "You all right there?" Jack could punch the man in the face.

Tosh lowers her arms at the same time their hands pull away and she pushes off from Jack, one last little shove to Ianto's hand as it peels from Jack's cock, still hard and not even remotely satiated. He thinks of a few choice Baudelaire lines, but now isn't the time to prove how literate he is, not when Ianto is straightening and shoving his hands in his jacket pockets, pulling away from Jack and the SUV and giving them their prerequisite amount of 'straight man space'.

Tosh bends and Jack admires her arse openly as she speaks to the driver. Ianto shrugs. "It was all so very promising," he says, and if Jack hadn't known him better, he would have missed the doleful tone there.

He smiles when she gestures to them. "Yeah well, you know, I'm sure we can raincheck dinner."

Ianto smirks then. "Yes, dinner." And then, when Tosh is back to saying something to the driver and they are blanketed in the noise of the car and a gust of wind. "You do understand that I thought we were going to have a threesome?"

Jack snorts.

"Because I was sure that I was crystal clear, and yet you seem to be—"

"Okay, he's willing to wait for the recovery vehicle, but he says the meter has to run." Tosh joins them at one of the most inopportune times, and Jack understands now that this is one big error of comedies.

So he does the best thing he can think of to salvage the night. "You go. There's no sense in us all waiting here, and I'm the best one to stay." He grabs Tosh by the shoulders and pulls her in for a little peck on the cheek, because he can't bear anything further. His cock is starting to soften, and he doesn't want to get excited about fruitless things. At least, he thinks, tonight.

Some other time, he'll have a lovely, long, drawn out moment of time, in which he and Toshiko will lean towards each other, like in a cinema (and he'll take pictures in his head, click click click) and he'll tilt his head _just so_ , and she'll tilt her head _just so_ , and their mouths will meet and he will kiss her within an inch of his life, because he wouldn't risk hers, not for that. He'll hold her face, maybe her waist, curve his hand around the back of her neck, maybe thread it into her hair. He'll tease her tongue and smell her lipstick because he'll be so very close, and she might make one of those little moans. He'll taper off the kiss and break it the way passionate kisses are supposed to be broken—with a ghost of the lips across the cheek so that he can start at the angle of her jaw, kiss his way down the side of her throat to her neck, and then from there, well, better to leave some things to the spur of the moment.

And then, wherever they are, with Ianto perhaps, that would be ideal, because three is always better, 'the good place' has photographic proof of that, they will all slot together like grass and sky and stars and of course, the metal earth and the ice on which they can all move so well. They will all kill loneliness, just for a while, a little while.

Jack pulls away from her, because he can't wait for it, he wants it so badly he feels like a green horse on a lunge, stop and start and stop and start, forward and jerky.

She sighs and stares at the SUV behind him for a second, assessing, and he's aware that Ianto is opening the door to the vehicle. It shuts, and he wonders if Ianto has just got in, but no, her purse juts out from Ianto's extended arm, and she takes it, leaning forward one more time to give Jack a brief hug.

"You're sure?"

He waves his hand. "Pah, they'll be going my way anyway." He winks. "They always are." And as she gets in the car, he looks at Ianto, watching the taxi driver with a little bit of brotherly suspicion. Possibly disappointment.

It's no big thing to pull Ianto into a hug right there, because Ianto is easy to startle like that, like he never sees it coming, and he's all graceless bluster and stumbling a bit, like when he wants to cover up surprise. Jack doesn't kiss him, for the same reason he can't bring himself to walk over to the taxi, open the door, and kiss Toshiko right and proper, the way she deserves. He'll settle for another press of his lips to frosty skin.

"Take her home," he says into Ianto's ear, and the coldness of the lobe is tickling. Ianto shudders and Jack wonders if his lips are just as icy. Funny how it's difficult to gauge coldness in one's extremities.

Ianto pulls back and looks at Tosh in the taxi, speaking to the driver and glancing at them. Her anxiety is palpable, and Jack knows she's not afraid to go home alone, not Tosh, and she's not afraid they'll freeze to death, not in the middle of the city. It's something else. Some strands of yarn that are stuck to her coat and stuck to Ianto's coat and his coat, and they've been caught in the closed car door that separates the three of them..

"I'll drop her off and come right back," Ianto says, face earnest, thinking and rethinking. He moves his hand as if he is brushing at something on his jacket, but it's nothing. Jack stills the hand and smiles at Tosh, then back to Ianto.

"Take her _home_ ," he says quietly, and he wonders at his choice of euphemism. "If you want."

Ianto blinks at him, and Jack waits, because really he has all the time in the world, and who cares if the meter runs up, because he'll gladly pay extra pounds to allow Ianto to come to this discovery, raw and naked and painted red, red as a body hurtling down a mountain in some sort of Shinto birth ritual. Well, Tosh always has had the magical gift to make him poetic and maudlin in his thoughts, Jack muses. Something about the way she types, about the way she stares over his shoulder when she's angry with him.

"What about you?" Ianto finally says, revelation made, thinking done, arms pinwheeling as he goes screaming down the mountainside.

Jack shrugs, but it's a happy one, and he realises that he's _happy_ to do this, to let them both go, to send them away without him. He'll see them later. It's not like they can escape. It's not that they don't love him. And it's not that he can't—

Well, he could, any way, any time, if he put his mind to it. He is quite charming, and quite attractive, and they already—

"Another time. I'll be fine."

They disengage, and Jack thinks of the times when he'd been on space freighters as a young boy (usually a vacation), and the captain would always pick a kid to disengage the docking bay coupling, because all it involved was pressing a button, but it was a big red button that usually said, 'Danger!' It's not unlike when airline pilots used to let kids come up to the cabin and "fly" the plane, but what Jack thinks of are the big metal arms of the docking bay disengaging from the coupling grapples, the way that his and Ianto's hands slide apart, fingers down the shoulders, along the forearms until the bodies rock away and the fingertips hook each other, the only thing touching. Finally, Ianto straightens his fingers, presses the big red button, and he's pointing at Jack as he goes.

"So sad." He makes a face at the car and shrugs his shoulders as if to say, 'What can you do?'

"A raincheck," Jack tells him as he walks backwards and opens the car door.

"A snowcheck." Ianto ducks into the car.

"A carcheck!" Jack half-shouts before the door shuts.

Tosh leans over and rolls down Ianto's window as the taxi starts to move. "Invisible dog check!" she calls out, her face disappearing as the taxi pulls further down the road. He gives it one last wave before turning away so that he can be the one to break it off first.

In front of him the SUV is gathering snowflakes, her engine cooled. The Torchwood logo on the bonnet is buckled and bent like a tiny metal hill, if he reads it like it looks it would be, "torCHWood," or that's how he phonetically sounds out the visual placement of things, spatially. He wonders what Ianto would say about that little synesthetic quirk (at home on Boeshane, he'd drawn the months of the year in an up-down-up-down shape in his head, to go with the seasons, and he's never been able to make Earth months match the shape in his mind quite the same. Not enough summers in a year.).

He doesn't know how this evening dragged so many childhood memories up. Maybe it was the bump into the airbag, though if all it took was a knock to the noggin, his trip off that building via John Hart should have brought his infancy to the fore. So he stands there and stares at the tiny landing strip of the median across the way, its two-foot wide stretch of grass sprinkled with snow that's finally decided to stick to something, a clear sign that it's getting colder.

Jack waits ten minutes, enough time for them to get to Tosh's flat, pay the driver, and head in the door, kicking off their shoes and storing them in the little honeycomb contraption that Tosh keeps by the welcome mat. He opens the back door to the SUV and climbs in, deciding not to lie down, but instead to sprawl right in the middle of the seat, so he can see directly out the middle of the windshield. He slouches and undoes his trousers, removes his gloves, squints ahead of him at the pole, dark and ridged in the dim light.

 _Right now, Ianto is removing his shirt. Toshiko is backing him into the bedroom, her hands in his trousers. He flings the shirt off to the side and reaches for hers, peeling it from her flushed skin and mating it with his own on the floor. Toshiko is moaning a little, and her fingers fumble with his jeans, because she doesn't want to catch his cock in the zip, since she doesn't know if he's wearing shorts or not. Ianto disengages from her mouth long enough to unzip her trousers and push them down, and then he sits on the side of the bed behind him and slides them the rest of the way, pressing his lips to her navel, tongue darting in the little hole while his eyes roll upwards._

Jack pulls his foreskin down and pretends that his hand is smaller and more refined.

 _Ianto tells her to leave her bra on, but her panties run down her thighs until they are a fabric roll she can step out of, and Ianto falls backwards on the bed so that she can help him yank his shorts off. Then she will slide over his body, the lace of her bra tickling his chest hair. His hands will seek out the places she wants to be touched: the backs of the knees, the nape of the neck. Toshiko would like to be kissed behind the ear, and at the join of the hip._

Jack fists himself but doesn't move; he's not inside her yet. Something is throttling low in his belly, and he slits his vision through narrowing eyes so that the pole seems to rise from the dashboard, seems to align with is hard and straight cock propped up in his fingers. He wants to be Ianto, here in this moment, because he knows him, knows what the man will do. Instead, he settles for turning the Ianto out of bed and staying with her himself.

 _There's a lot of Toshiko to taste, both of substance and non-corporeal, when one thinks of the more complicated aspects of having sex with a genius who also has a spirit for poetry. Toshiko's legs are tapered and lean, her waist is soft. Her hair is a sheet of black, that fringe dripping down to punctuate her face in commas and parentheses. She is a biter, soft nips at calves and shoulders, teeth running off of rounded edges so that nothing ever hurts, nothing ever snags, and her fingers pull and scratch like water rolling over the gentle slope of a leather saddle left in the rain. It's easy to roll with her body, to rock it and shift it and let it move over him in a wave, like yanking sheets into the air and diving under, lying still as the cotton settles on the body like mist._

Jack closes his eyes finally, because it's easier to see phantom Toshiko, to see that his hands look not like his own, but Ianto's. Toshiko cards her fingers through the hair on his chest, lowers her one hand to roll on the condom. He can feel the press of her fingers, the ends of her nails, the gentle pressure when she rolls his balls in her palm and squeezes a little. He lets her guide him, and pushing into her is like soaring into space, like engaging a coupling, like the satisfaction of coming to a sliding stop on the ice.

 _Ianto keeps the missionary position because it's more intimate for a first time, because there will be other times to turn her over, or let her turn him so that she can ride his cock , the sway of her hips above him like swirling water in a glass. He hitches one of her knees up to go deeper, but bends in the centre of his spine to make a U_ (torCHWood) _so that he can kiss her mouth. They leave the lights on because they need to see, because the dark is the wife of loneliness._

Jack screws his eyes shut until he can see stars, pinpoints of light created by pressure, and he strokes himself finally, pumping his tightening hand up and down without pretending he can feel the condom, feel the inside of Toshiko without being there because he doesn't know any better, doesn't know what she feels like. He doesn't know what her lips taste like, really, or the softness of her hips, the flesh on them that makes her body's shape flare like the rounded sides of a fruit.

He knows the smell of Ianto's sweat on the sheets, what it tastes like when Toshiko licks it from the reservoir just above his clavicle. He knows intimately the tightness of Ianto's balls before he comes, or the way he ducks his head so that no one can see his face when he's finally open, emptying himself. Jack can readily supply the image of Ianto's hair, or the sound of his laboured breathing, punctuated by filthy little bursts of speech, sometimes not even in a spoken language, but one that's impossible to misunderstand.

He thrusts his hips up and spills into his hand before he notices the yellow spinning lights of the recovery vehicle, and he has to sit up, extracting himself from fantasy in the manner of a tape measure shooting back into the casing. The driver looks foreign; he's glancing about, lost, eyes searching. Jack wipes his hand on the bottom half of one trouser leg, knowing that when it dries white on the material, it will be mistaken for road grime. He tucks himself away and wonders how long Ianto and Tosh will play with each other, rolling on the sheets, how long Tosh will dance her hair along his skin, how long Ianto will tighten her to his thighs and lips.

And if he chose then, to go to them, would they have space enough for him? Would they undress him together, or let him to it himself, some little friendly strip to gain admittance to Tosh's assuredly soft and warm bed? Would they take pity on an old man and buffer him on both sides?

He opens the door and waves at the driver. "Hi there! Nick of time!"

The driver is cold and grumpy, but he doesn't take it out on Jack. Jack helps him couple the hitch to the back of the SUV, and load it on the rails of the bed. He lets Jack sit in the passenger's side as they trundle through the increasingly sloppy and dismal weather and back to the bay, where Jack directs him to the aboveground parking lot. After they spiral up to the top level and park in the wasteland of disused governmental vehicles, he even lets Jack press the button to unload the vehicle, a disappointingly black button that has to words written on it.

Jack sighs when he looks at the car. It's going to need work, and the spare SUV is waiting under a tarp elsewhere, but it's about three software upgrades behind, and it will require a lot of equipment transfer, something he is sure he'll hear about tomorrow.

The driver, whose English is chopped but functional, blinks at him as they finish. "And you?" He shoves his hands in his pockets and stares nervously at the stripes on Jack's coat. "You are wanting ride? I drive you, yeah?"

Jack doesn't know whether or not that's an offer the guy is allowed to make, or if he's doing it out of the goodness of his heart. Maybe he wants some extra cash on the side. Whatever it is, Jack could use the ride back to the Plass proper.

Or elsewhere. The possibility is sensitive, tacky, not yet dry. It feels like the jitters he'd got five minutes before Caroline had walked down the aisle towards him, or the excitement of a completed triple axel, or even the thrill of pressing a big red button. Turning the street corner and spying the wrong blue police box in the middle of an otherwise mediocre day.

"Home," he says, getting back into the passenger side. "Take me home."

The driver turns over his engine and pets the steering wheel reassuringly. "Where home?"

Jack sighs again, a collapsing bellows, and looks up, out the window. With no buildings to block it, the sky is a studded blanket slathered with clouds, beyond those gray mounds a vast yawning spread of unfathomable twinkles, some infinite puzzle. It stretches on forever in all directions. He doesn't even know where to start, even if that isn't remotely what the driver means.

In his pocket, his phone vibrates and when he pulls it out, he can see that it is a text from Toshiko.

"Come home."

END

**Author's Note:**

> ENDnotes: I feel like I should say that I cribbed two lines in the attempt to make an allusion, and I don't feel comfortable not mentioning them. To avoid the hint of plagiarism, I played with the following two lines from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman, one of this is recognisible clearly, and one which has been altered: _'I turn the bridegroom out of bed and stay with the bride myself,/I tighten her all night to my thighs and lips.'_ Thanks.


End file.
